News

On March 07, 2012, around 1h30 Belgian time, an X5.4 flare was detected in the same sunspot group that produced the X1.1 flare on March 05.
A magnetized plasma cloud was ejected into space. The consequences for Belgium are for this moment limited. [...]

The SWAP telescope onboard the Belgian-led satellite PROBA2 has obtained some of the best-ever photographs of a comet passing near the sun. Comet Lovejoy flew through the solar corona, just above the sun’s surface, near midnight on December 16, 2011. This is only the second time ever that a comet has been observed in an extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) solar telescope. [...]

An international team led by KU Leuven astronomer Leen Decin and including Martin Groenewegen of ROB discovered not less than a dozen cold dust arcs around the giant star CW Leo. The team used the sensitive PACS instrument on board the Herschel Space Observatory to detect for the first time arcs of dust far away from the star. [...]

The Royal Observatory of Belgium participates in an interdisciplinary study on the origin of the early magnetic field of the early Moon. Researchers from the field of fluid mechanics and lunar geophysics joined forces. They showed in their article in Nature that the early magnetic field was caused by movements of material after instantaneous changes of the rotation rate of [...]

The stars are boiling! The reason is the energy generated in the centre of the star that wants to escape. If this does not happen quickly enough, the star starts to ‘boil’ in the outer layers causing vibrations that result in light variations, like in the Sun. Such oscillations have now been discovered by Victoria Antoci and collaborators, including astronomer [...]

On the basis of gravity and radar observations with the Cassini spacecraft, the moment of inertia of Titan and the orientation of Titan’s rotation axis have been estimated in recent studies. According to the observed orientation, Titan is close to the Cassini state. However, the observed obliquity is inconsistent with the estimate of the moment of inertia for an entirely [...]

Using the GPS data collected in two stations of the International GNSS Service (IGS), we computed the displacements of these stations due to the Earthquake. The stations are located in Mizusawa and Tsukuba at 140 km and 300 km far from the epicenter. The displacements are computed using kinematic Precise Point Positioning, with the software Atomium developed at the Royal [...]

NOAA AR 1158 has produced an X2.2 flare peaking at 01:56 UT, associated with an Earth directed CME. Furthermore, an M2.2 flare (from the same AR) peaking at 17:26 UT on February 14 had also an associated Earth directed CME. They are expected to arrive to the Earth around February 17. [...]